It's a simple matter of burning fuel to push reaction mass out the back end of the rocket. With Newton's Third Law, you get forward motion. Use mini rockets for maneuvering, and there you have it. Rockets in space aren't hard.
As for guns...
Lasers just don't work like that, period. Neither does plasma. I don't have enough expertise to comment on the rest, but I suspect they also don't work like that, at all.
Oh, and tachyons don't even exist. They are a hypothesis which cannot be tested, and only exist in mathematical models.
That's a pretty good article concerning the fact that you can't expect fiction to abide by real world laws. Or at least any we know of.
In any case, I'm guessing missiles could be propelled with some kind of solid hydrogen booster? Plasma and lasers definitely don't work the way they are depicted though, and I've never heard of tachyon outside of Freelancer.
It is rather obvious that a laser or plasma weapon woulndt work in that manner, ANd tachyon Is Purley hypothetical. Laser weapons as they are presented are much closer to an actual THeoreticall plasma weapon, As a real laser moves at the speed of light, not 750 m/sec. AN actuall Plasma weapon would also require Gas to energize and eject, Making such a weapon Ammmo dependent.
So while at this point they appear theoretical at best, since they would naturally operate FTL - there are many things in science fiction in general and Freelancer/Discovery specifically which operate FTL. The comm system in vanilla, along with the uploading of information to the neural net, appears to operate with some sort of tachyon emissions - otherwise how could you talk, in real time, from one system in Sirius to another?
(And by that, I of course am referring to the complete lack of delay in transmission when you're talking to someone that isn't just millions of miles away, but is hundreds of light years away.)
As for weaponry and things that go flash in the dark...
Since it's very, very difficult for the human eye to actually SEE things in space (based on what I've read of eye-witness accounts) - AND since all of our characters supposedly have some kind of neural net implants and/or enhancements - I consider all the weapon effects to be a superimposing onto our visual cortex by the processors inside. Something that is recognized with fighter pilots today is that if they have some kind of visual reference, it's much easier for them to pick something out and react to it. So what we're seeing isn't the actual weapon itself firing - it's the processor picking up the weapons fire and showing it to us, so we can react to that.
Otherwise - a light speed would fire and hit effectively instantly (or with less than 1 second of delay) out to a range of 300,000 kilometers. (rounded for simplicity sake, or 299,792,458 meters, if you want to be picky about it.) And since - again, it works at the speed of light - there's no warning. You shoot, your target doesn't even know it's coming because - unless those mysterious tachyon sensors are working - we're still stuck with the speed of light for our sensors.
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
About losing speed in e-kill. When there is no friction, an object will always keep the same speed, therefore, slowing down when in e-kill is unrealistic.
A list of unrealistic stuff could go on and on.
Let me think of stuff that there in FL that is unrealistic.
- Weapons
- Presence of drag in space
- Scaling
- Everything is fixed and everything is on the same level of altitude save a few stations in the mod.
- Many others
' Wrote:FL is Sci-Fi. What doew the fact its unrealistic creates you any problems??
And when there is no friction, an object will always keep the same speed, therefore, slowing down when in e-kill is unrealistic.
A list of unrealistic stuff could go on and on.
Let me think of stuff that there in FL that is unrealistic.
- Weapons
- Presence of drag in space
- Scaling
- Everything is fixed and almost everything is on the same plane.
- Many others
Go and play Freelancer: Combat Evolved. You had scaling, slipspace, Newtonian physics, and Halo ships. Damn sham Newtonian physics made combat impossible. My damn Covenant Frigate was going 1000 MPS in one direction with that damn UNSC destroyer going 500 MPS in the opposite direction.
Realism makes things complicated, frustrating, and not worth it.
"THE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THESCIENCEIS LEAKING OUT!"